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Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore
(www.newyorker.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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Technology
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I feel like I've found refuge here. Looking at my open tabs, what used to be Twitter, Reddit, and Insta is now my own hosted platforms. Plex for TV and Lemmy here for social. I have gmail still, but I'm leaving.
The communities are smaller, but I rarely feel as anxious, stressed, or annoyed as I did with the other platforms. Oh and no one is trying to get me to buy a washing machine either.
Dissenting opinion, I'm sure, but I see in Lemmy the same problems I saw with reddit at the time I left it: superficial content designed to generate superficial engagement driven by people on mobile devices. Lemmy, reddit, and virtually all other content aggregators fall into the same pattern of posting screenshots from Twitter and recycled memes that everyone's seen. It's like the author of the article says: the internet isn't as interactive or novel as it used to be. Part of that is the centralization of media into a handful of supergiant corporations, but it's also an extension of the technological landscape and how people today interact with the media they consume. Which as time goes on is more and more driven by mobile devices.
I like all the dad-level humor with the awful, often punny Star Trek memes. They give me life.
Live long and prosper is the opposite of live fast, die young.
/c/risa is family.
Blocking some of the meme communities is a big help in that regard.
Or just switch your default timeline to "subscribed"
"All" was always terrible on reddit, that hasn't changed here.
imo there isn't enough content on Lemmy to only whitelist certain communities. I prefer to just block the extra stuff I don't want. All is fine if you take out most the low effort communities. I only have 10 or so communities blocked and it makes a noticeable difference. Much easier than subscribing to a bunch of communities for me.
This is really the central problem. There's way fewer posts on any given Lemmy/fediverse network compared to the major players, and I've been conditioned by the last 13 years I spent on reddit to have constant interactive stimuli and discussion based on my interests. That doesn't exist here because the communities are so small. Admittedly, yeah, I could post. But I've always been a commenter on existing discussions, not someone who wants to start the discussions myself.
The relative lack of content on Lemmy, for me, has been a boon. I go through New, then Top 6 Hours, then Top 12 Hours, then I need to find something else to do. When I was on Reddit, I found myself bouncing between Reddit and YouTube for entertainment. With Lemmy not having boundless amounts of crap to scroll through and no algorithm, my tech usage is far more varied.
There is for me. And (almost) nothing I subscribe to are those non-low-effort communities.
I also don't doom scroll for hours at a time, so maybe that's partly why.
I like to sometimes just open up other interest-focused instances and check their local feeds for anything interesting. A "subscribed instances" feed would provide a decent balance, in my opinion.
I can see the need for a community that requires more from a poster than just dumping a link with a title.
On tumblr they're writing fanfics about clowns breeds as if they're pets. I mean come on.
But I wonder if that blogging style, adding stuff that makes oneself look complex and interesting, is what originally inspires those complex posts.